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Grand Central Political Magazine
There's A Climate Change Debate, But You Won't Hear About It
By Dan Gainor and Julia A. Seymour
The news media are hard at work trying to convince you the debate on climate change is over. Networks bombard viewers with claims of impending climate cataclysm from politicians like Al Gore and celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Madonna and Dave Matthews.
But there is another perspective - held by hundreds of scientists. Some of those experts joined public policy professionals in New York for the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change.
The event itself was proof that, contrary to what Gore has said, the global warming debate still rages - just not on ABC, CBS and NBC news shows. Perhaps that's because reporters make it their "mission" to prove global warming will destroy animals, people and places unless mankind (especially American mankind) institute some drastic changes.
The "Today" show literally went to the "Ends of the Earth" in November 2007 to make that point - hypocritically spewing about 25 tons of carbon traveling to Antarctica, Greenland and Ecuador. It would have taken an ordinary person more than three years to muster a "carbon footprint" that large.
Ann Curry, forgetting journalistic objectivity, blatantly exposed the purpose of her trip to Antarctica: "[O]ur mission, of course, is to find evidence of climate change."
Ironically, "Today" promised viewers a debate. Leading up to its broadcast, co-anchor Matt Lauer teased: "And you're [Meredith Vieira] going to be interviewing all the experts talking about the issues of climate change," said Lauer.
Vieira replied, "Absolutely. Getting into a whole debate, too, because some people believe there's an effect of climate change, others say not really."
They lied. There was no debate - just like most other days on network news. On the two "Ends of the Earth" broadcasts Vieira spoke only to "experts" Al Gore, Chip Giller and Katherine Wroth of the left-wing environmental Web site Grist.org. Wroth is also co-author of Grist's first book: "Wake Up and Smell the Planet." So much for a debate.
A new study from the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute found it wasn't just "Today" that silenced debate. According to the report, "Global Warming Censored," the three television networks cut out dissenting views 80 percent of the time.
The worst network was CBS, which ignored other opinions on global warming or climate change in a whopping 97 percent of stories. No surprise, however, since CBS relies on activist/journalist Scott Pelley for climate change reports. In 2006, Pelley argued that he shouldn't include opposing views in reports because global warming skeptics are like Holocaust "deniers."
CBS's Harry Smith embraced that attitude. He didn't include any rebuttal when he declared that "there is, in fact, global climate change" on the Aug. 7, 2007, "Early Show." According to Smith, "it really affects some climates much more than others and it's really caused some real serious problems." Smith is no scientist.
In fact, the networks didn't rely on many scientists at all. Unidentified people were quoted more often than experts to support climate hype in a six-month period.
Scientists were even rarer when it came to expressing skepticism. A paltry 37 people out of 503 sources were allowed to express any skepticism, and only seven of those were scientists.
When dissenting views were included, reporters used labels like "skeptic," "cynic" and "denier" to refer to people with views diverging from the media-trumpeted "consensus" on global warming.
In one broadcast, "NBC Nightly News" included two people with a different viewpoint. One of them, Dr. Pat Michaels, a research professor of environmental sciences and Cato Institute senior fellow, was called "proudly a denier" by chief environmental affairs correspondent Anne Thompson.
But Michaels doesn't deny the existence of climate change or its reputed source. He told BMI, "I have written and spoken repeatedly in the last 15 years that human beings are responsible for most of the warming in the past century." But he still disagrees with the "consensus" that warming will have catastrophic consequences.
Thompson also undermined Michaels and Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute by rejecting their opinions and questioning their legitimacy: "Climate experts say whether hired guns or honest dissenters, deniers are confusing the issue and delaying solutions." Translation: There are no "experts" in the field of "deniers."
Michaels told BMI that if the media would present the full debate on climate change people "would benefit from appreciating the true scientific diversity on the topic. The arguments against these gloom-and-doom global warming scenarios are much stronger than the arguments for them."
Outside of the network news, the debate still flourishes. One list of nearly 500 scientists with alternative opinions was released on Dec. 20, 2007, but wasn't mentioned at all on the three networks by the end of the year.
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Dan Gainor is the T. Boone Pickens Fellow and Vice President of the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute. Julia Seymour is assistant editor. Researcher Genevieve Ebel also contributed to this analysis.